Timorous Dreams
by Assimbya
Summary: If Anne had been asked why she accepted Richard's proposal, she would not have known how to answer.


During the first night she slept in bed with him, Anne found herself wide-awake, startled into terror. The room was dark, and she at first could not remember where she was. She had been woken by a scream, low and horrible, and as she shivered under the heavy canopies of the bed she felt as though she had heard her husband's death cries. But then the cry came again, lower but unmistakable, and she realized that it came from the man who lay beside her, a man who, with his twisted limbs and his thatch of dark hair, was certainly not Edward.

It was only then that she remembered where she was, and who she lay beside, and what she had done.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Anne looked down at Richard. He had thrown off his blankets in his sleep, and his breathing was uneven. What sorts of nightmares could he, the perpetual victor, be having?

_But of course,_ Anne said to herself, _he's seen more blood than I could ever imagine. Even murderers can dream about their crimes. Or perhaps he fears the ghosts of his victims coming back to him, taking their revenge. Perhaps even now he feels himself set upon by King Henry, or by my own Edward._

Anne pushed the hair away from his pallid forehead. One day, she knew, her own curse would come back to him, doom from the earth and from the sky. How must he feel, in bed beside one of the victims of his own cruelty? But ancient warriors had done this all the time, taken for concubines the women whose husbands they had murdered and whose cities they had burned. Had Ajax always feared a sword hidden in Tecmessa's bed, a drop of poison in the wine she poured?

Should Richard fear such from her?

"When the ship goes out from this shore," Cassandra had said before becoming Agamemnon's slave, "she carries one of the three furies in my shape."

Anne was no fury. Even when Richard had put his own dagger in her hand and bared his breast, even then she had not taken the vengeance she was owed. She had not been able to bear it, harming this man whose body was so frail and whose tongue dripped with honey. She was a weak, changeable woman - so she knew herself, so she must be, to greet him with curses and to bid farewell with his ring upon her hand. She was certain that he smirked at her impossible capitulation behind his expression of earnest regard. Why had she given in to him?

Anne knew no answer that she could bear even to speak in her own mind.

Richard loved to touch her. Sometimes he could pass an entire evening doing nothing but tracing the shadows on Anne's pale skin. He would run his fingers across her body like spiders, up her ankles and knees and thighs, across her collarbone, over her eyes. He would lay her out before the fireplace and she would stay there, naked and still under his attention.

On some nights, his smile was crooked with merriment, and he brought her to laughter with the tickling brush of his fingertips, her body curling in towards him in fluttering, tender joy. On others, she lay as though ensorcelled, melting in the glow of the fire. He still smiled, but it was a private, indecipherable smile. If she tried to speak he would creep his fingers up until they rested lightly upon her lips, holding them still.

Only rarely did he allow her to touch him.

Reasons why she may have accepted his proposal -

She was afraid of him.

She was afraid of his brothers.

She was very alone.

She had never been called beautiful before.

She had gone mad with grief.

She did not truly grieve.

She wanted power.

She wanted safety.

She wanted him.

"My Anne," he called her, with his hands at her neck, "I will make you Queen."

She froze, and slowly laid down her embroidery, "I am content, my lord," she told him, "to be nothing more than your wife."

He laughed. "I do not believe it of you, my dear. Few relinquish the possibility of queenship so lightly, and you have come nearer to it than most. I would not have you think that you have lost anything in marrying me."

Anne felt cold swelling in her chest, beneath her fingernails, at the roots of her hair. "My lord, what is it you plan?"

There were surely at least half a dozen of his own family between him and the throne. Even he could not -

"It is not your concern; I have others to advise me in such things."

"I am your wife," she told him, "you can trust me."

"I do not believe you loyal to anyone but yourself, my lady Anne, Warwick's daughter."

She wanted to refute that claim and protest her innocence, but she did not even know herself whether he spoke the truth.

On the night that she would later know to be the one on which Clarence died, Richard wept in his sleep. She was woken by the sound - often, since their wedding night, she had slept ill through his terrors and cries. She was accustomed to his nightmares now, and panicked no longer, but this night was the first on which she had seen him cry. His face was wet with it, and crumpled like a child's. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but she could not understand the words. The pity for him hurt in her, like tears forced down in her throat - she could not suppress it. Longing to soothe, she touched his forehead and cheeks, as she had in the past, and then his neck, his chest -

He was awake in an instant, twisting away from her touch and reaching for the knife he kept at his bedside. Before she could react she was pinned down, his dagger at her throat.

"Richard," she cried, "Richard, it's me, it's Anne."

Suddenly he relaxed, as though exhaling a long-held breath. Easing his bad leg around he carefully hoisted himself out of bed, going to light a candle. When he was finished he returned to the bed and sat back before her, fingering the knife between his hands.

"What just happened?" she asked him.

"Assassins." His laugh was a dry, withered sound. "I must always be wary. You have married a mad man, my dear lady Anne. You would have done better to kill me when you had the chance."

"Do you not think I still could?" she asked lightly, "That knife at our bedside could as easily be fit to my hand as to yours. You must have thought it, you who fears assassins so."

He did not put the knife away. "So you could. And I have given you enough reason. Well, I will not prevent you." He offered it to her, hilt first. "Take up the sword again, Anne."

She accepted it in both palms, hands trembling. The single candle only barely illuminated his face, which looked ravaged, worn away by sand.

"They would find you," he said, "tomorrow morning, surfeited with my blood, drunk on it. Two in one!" He laughed, thinly. "And a wet death it will be, both of ours, a glutton's death, for what better death to repay my lust than to be stabbed through in the arms of my own ill-got wife?"

"My lord," she said cautiously, "you know I will not do this. You speak in riddles - if you have some secret to confide, I shall listen."

But without answering, he crushed the candle-flame between his fingers and lay back down to sleep, leaving her in the dark holding his knife in her hands.

Sometimes, he liked to strangle her. He was careful about it, warning her of what he would do before he began and tightening his fingers only slowly upon her neck. But she panicked anyway, as soon as she felt her throat pressing in upon itself, breath pooling uselessly in her mouth. She thrashed and struggled, but he would not let go till it had been so long that light darted before her eyes.

When he did let go, however, she felt so paradoxically alive, as though everything was brighter. She longed for him then, she longed with her thighs and her wrists and her sharp white teeth. And, as his fingers slackened, he might even permit her to touch him, to devour his battle-worn skin in her greedy palms. She felt him to be vulnerable to her in his arousal, more vulnerable than he had been with his breast bared to his own dagger. She could not understand it, how it was that, after he deprived her of breath, it was he who became weak and she who became strong, daring, bold enough to wind her knees around his crooked hips while he only looked up, fascinated, at the dark bruises blooming on her throat.

She felt ashamed of those bruises afterwards, however gleaming and clean they felt in the heady closeness of Richard's bed. She wore high-necked gowns to cover them, but as their marriage wore on and Richard's pride burgeoned, he began forbidding her to hide them, wishing her to wear her bodices low and her dark hair high, her discolored neck straight and queenly. She went into court at his side, seeing eyes lingering upon the imprints of Richard's fingers that marked her, and felt hollow and empty. I am dead, she thought to herself, I am already dead and this is a cold corpse who stands at my husband's side.

The thought, she found, helped her maintain her composure.

She ripped the crown from her head, wishing it were made of thorns, wishing that, with it, she could unfix her queenship from her very flesh, pull it out from where its sharp teeth had embedded until blood dripped from her hair. She could almost see the blood upon the gold, tarnishing it.

"I will not," she told him, "be your queen upon a throne of bones, I will not take the highest office in the land when women still live who have been deprived of it by your treachery. I will not approve of murder by my silence -"

"You were glad enough," he replied, quick as a viper, "to come to the bed of your husband's murderer, dear wife. Curious that your conscience should trouble you now."

Fury made her tremble. "I have not forgiven you, Richard, and you are a fool if you think I have. You remember my curses; I did not feign when I pronounced them."

"What are you then, too weak to dare your own revenge? Oh, you may be sure that I believe in your hatred, when you moaned my name so prettily the other night -"

"Do you ever listen? I did not say that I hate you, but only that I have not forgiven what you did. I meant my curses and still do, but I shall not be the agent of their fulfillment. It is not for me to decide your punishment. I married you for love, but now -"

"But now? I am the same man you married, Anne. If I am a murderer now, then I was so then."

"There is a difference between killing grown men who can defend themselves and slaughtering children. To kill a child is monstrous -"

"Monstrous deeds," he told her, his voice suddenly cold and hard as stone, "are fitting to a monster such as I."

Anne tried to gentle her voice, in fear and in compassion. "I have never thought you a monster, my lord. Ask yourself whether I ever have held your deformity against you."

He stepped close to her then, his heel of his bad leg thudding dully on the floor, grabbing her hair in his hands. "It was my skill that made you forget my ugliness, lady. I remember how I slowly dripped my honeyed words onto your revulsion until it melted into desire. Do you think I have forgotten your insults then? Foul toad, you called me, diffused infection of a man. You thought me a monster ere ever I ever made you think you loved me."

His breath was hot upon her face, and, for the first time in their marriage, Anne feared that Richard might hit her. But she kept her voice even.

"Yet still, I chose to marry you. You may argue that your flattery addled my wits or blinded my eyes, but there was nothing to prevent my refusal of your suit. The opinion of all the world would have been with me. I chose you, husband."

And to that, he had no answer.

Anne was beginning to think that Richard had infected her with his nightmares. She slept little now, but when she did sleep her rest was populated by corpses - Clarence bloated, floating, unrecognizable, the fair-haired princes drenched in blood. She woke racked with feverish shivering, her throat raw as though she had been crying out as she had heard Richard do.

_Have I taken on his guilt?_ she asked herself, wrapping the blankets on the bed around her shoulders,_ Am I, his queen, as responsible as he? Am I doomed always to be haunted by his ghosts?_

Anne looked at Richard, still sleeping beside her. If she had cried out, then she had not done so loud enough to wake him. He was right to fear assassins - after so many murders, there was certainly many who desired his death. Was she destined to be a widow twice over?

Of course she was. She could remember still her long ago curse. _And be thy wife, if any be so mad, more miserable by the death of thee than thou has made me by my dear lord's death!_ The end of her marriage had been writ into it from its beginning.

And, when Richard was murdered, would she lie in this very bed, sheets drenched with his blood, and open her legs to her second husband's murderer? Would she make of herself a perpetual war-prize, passed along an endless line of murdered monarchs?

No, she knew then as she wrapped her arms around her always-empty womb, she could not.

She must die before him.

Anne sat on her throne beside Richard, but she did not exist. She was a stone figure, a simulacrum, a corpse. Her eyes were colored glass, and could not see the tears of Richard's petitioners. Her ears were echoing marble and could not hear his hard, ringing laughter, his orders of execution. She was turned inward, her eyes opening only upon the endless vistas of herself, attuned only to the rare touch that drew her out - fingers upon her wrist, a kiss upon her cheek, a hand at her waist guiding her up. "My lady Anne", he said, "my wife," "my queen," and she would stand, she would follow him, she would eat at the banquets or incline her head to the commoners. But with every unseen execution, every sleepless night, she was fading further and further away. And, every time, it took longer for Richard to draw her back.

He was weeping as his hands closed upon her throat. It was the first time she had seen him cry in his waking life. She found herself relieved, quietly, distantly, that he had accorded to her the personal attention of his own touch, rather than the anonymity of an unknown assassin. "I am sorry, Anne, my lady," he told her, his voice hoarse, "this is what I must do."

She looked him in the eyes and said, while she still had breath to speak. "Yes. I understand. Do as you will."


End file.
